A Study Of Chinese Non-English Major College Students’ Acquisition Of English Lexicalized Causative Verbs

This thesis is aimed to investigate multi-level Chinese EFL learners’ acquisitionof English lexicalized causative verbs and causes of current situation, so as to putforward relative teaching and learning implications. This thesis adopts classificationmade by Banczerowski (1980): expressions on causativity fall into two types:analytic and synthetic approaches. Chinese EFL learners tend to apply the formerapproach, namely, using causative sentence structure or phrases, especially phraseslike “Make/Have/Get+Object+Complement”. It differs from native speakers’ usage.Chen Guohua&Zhou Rong (2006) concluded that English native speakers usephrase “Make+Object+Complement” less than Chinese EFL learners, byestablishing a corpus based on “Little Prince”, a well known novel in English spokencountries. Thereby, Chinese EFL learners do have overuse of phrase “Make+Object+Complement”. It discloses that Chinese EFL learners have difficulties in masteringthe synthetic way of expressing causativity.The synthetic way refers to direct expressions of causativity by means ofcausative verbs. Researches in this field at home and aboard are scarce, theacquisition of causative verbs is crucial to enhancing EFL learners’ idiomaticexpressions, though. As causative verbs are mainly formed by lexicalization, studieson lexicalized causative verbs are of great significance. Lexicalized causative verbsconsist of affix-shifted causative verbs and identical-shifted causative verbs. Thus, alexicalized causative verbs-token test was designed to investigate EFL learners’acquisition situation.60non-English major college students from Chongqing NormalUniversity,20members at each level, participated in the test. After the test,6students at each language proficiency level took an interview, which is conducted forexploring causes for current acquisition state. Data collected from the test andinterview was entered into SPSS software for further analysis.The conclusion of this study is first Chinese EFL learners acquired affix-shift causative verbs better than identical-shift causative verbs. Second, the score ofaffix-shift causative verbs increases proportionately with the language proficiencylevel. Third, the score of identical-shift causative verbs does not increaseproportionately with the language proficiency level. In fact, the mean score obtainedby subjects at intermediate level was not significantly different from that of those atlow language proficiency level. From the interview records, we understand that thecurrent acquisition situation is owing to no systematic instruction of lexicalizedcausative verbs in the textbook, or from teachers. Besides, students have difficulty inacquiring systematic knowledge of lexicalized causative verbs from other source.This study is aimed at investigating Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition situationof English lexicalized causative verbs and providing further pedagogical implicationsfor teaching in those verbs.